What has the AAP really achieved?
- Shruti Sundar Ray
- Feb 18, 2020
- 3 min read
The Aam Aadmi Party’s political rise may, in practical terms, be a shot in the arm for the Bharatiya Janata Party
For a party that rose from the ashes of a popular anti-corruption movement and was initially dismissed by critics for its activist antecedents, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has come a long way. Arvind Kejriwal, the national convener and face of the party, was sworn in for his third-term as Chief Minister of the National Capital Territory of Delhi on Sunday.
The bhakt reading of AAP’s victory is simple—that the AAP has managed to successfully hoodwink the Delhi public with its freebies. But such handouts would not hold sway for long.
On the other hand, with supporters of AAP as well as liberal observers from other states (who have no stake in the pot), the electoral run of the party is being hailed. Hailed for its successful propping up of the governance plank, for continuing to be a bastion of centrist ‘common man’ centred politics, and if one were to be generous, for standing as an alternative pole to the divisive right-wing rhetoric of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
While these accusations and salutations bear some degree of merit, the underlying achievement of the AAP may be seen as something entirely different—AAP’s meteoric rise has ridden BJP of its biggest rival, the Indian National Congress (Congress).
This can be observed from the very inception of the AAP in the India Against Corruption movement. The movement fed on and in turn fed the growing mistrust of the public in the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government of the time. Nowhere was this as true as in Delhi. In the 2013 assembly elections, the first after the anti-corruption movement, the Congress faced drastic losses—its share falling to eight seats from 43 while the AAP scored a maiden 28 seats. The BJP too gained electorally with 34 seats, up from 23 in the previous assembly.
After the hung assembly and President’s Rule of 2013–2014, AAP came to power again in the 2015 elections with a landslide victory. It had won 67 seats—effectively wiping out both the Congress and the BJP. Even then, when the people needed to vote decisively for a single party, BJP managed to retain three constituencies with a vote share of a not-inconsiderable 32% while the Congress had zero seats and a vote share of only 10%.
AAP’s popularity has not necessarily eaten into the performance of the BJP, instead it has displaced the INC from the mainstream of Delhi politics. Such an analysis holds truer in the recently concluded 2020 elections. The BJP has gained both in terms of vote share and seats. The Congress, again, has failed to open its account.
What this means for Delhi is the emergence of two poles of political power—the AAP, with its promise of corruption-free development and the BJP, also with its promise of corruption-free development? The AAP like its leader Kejriwal has donned many hats (including the ubiquitous party hat) over the years—from an outcast to the system to a champion of the power of government.
The two parties are symptoms of a deeper illness that has pervaded through Indian politics—the lack of options (epitomized in the need for the introduction of None of the Above or NOTA option for voters). The election manifestos and general agenda of all parties—be they at the state or central levels—are fairly similar when it comes to matters of governance and economic policy. In terms of on-ground performance, all parties claim to be pillars of honesty and service but are riddled, to varying extents, by corruption scams and scandals.
The only salient difference between parties lies in the different identity politics that they appeal to. The easiest way to tell one party apart from another is to look at what identity groups they wish to identify with. In India, the identity lines have been drawn along religion and caste. And so have the party lines.
The Congress had grown and prospered on a plank of centrist pan-India ‘nationalism’, which drew from the independence movement. Over the years, it had morphed into a dynastic bureaucratic beast that could command people but not their faith. It is this vacuum of faith that saw the rise or resurgence of populist parties (with fresh blood and the allure of reform) such as the BJP, at the centre and AAP and others, in the states.
It is tempting to think of the AAP as an outlier to the norm of identity politics—it does not attach itself to any specific caste or religion. Who it does chose to identify with is the middle-class secular-yet-vaguely-Hindu ‘aam aadmi’ of urban India. And is not that an emerging identity creed of its own?
The AAP and the BJP are two sides of the same rusty coin of Indian politics. If not for their apparently distinct ideological leanings, the parties could easily have been the same side of the same coin.
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